Pres. Trump CNBC Interview, CEO Change at Apple, Warsh Confirmation Hearing Day 4/21/26

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David Faber (0:43)

Market insight and analysis. You're listening to the opening bell of CNBC's Squawk on the Street.

Good morning, welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm David Faber with Jim Cramer, live from the Postline at the New York Stock Exchange. Carl has the morning off. We get started with trading 20 minutes from now, a little later than usual. Of course, listening to the president's comments. And Jim, let's just get right into it this morning. Of course, a lot to cover here. Tim Cook, obviously stepping down as the CEO as of September of this year of Apple. But before we get into the sort of the financial news of the morning, going over some of the president's comments here from a long-ranging interview with Joe, Becky and Andrew. You know, not clear that there was anything new here in terms of for the market to digest when it comes to the war in Iran or the potential peace talks that are taking place or about to take place in Pakistan. I don't know if you heard anything different than how I'm characterizing it.

Jim Cramer (1:49)

I think the president was, there was a very interesting line, which is when I hit 50,000 down, when I hit, I mean, this is kind of a person who is back looking at what the market's doing and how he's aligned with it versus obviously previous presidents, looking at what is going to happen with Warsh, obviously once a lower interest rates, looking at the war and talking about companies that are helping, looking at AI and talking about what happened with Anthropic. So it's a wide-ranging interview, David. It talks about a lot involved in the stock market, which obviously thinks the world of Tim Cook.

It's more of a, I would say, an expiation on some of the things he's been talking about.

David Faber (2:38)

Yeah.

Jim Cramer (2:39)

And it's, there's no doubt about that his confidence about what's going to happen with Iran is extraordinary.

David Faber (2:47)

Right.

Jim Cramer (2:48)

Extraordinary.

David Faber (2:48)

As we see, we are preparing for a higher open this morning for stocks and we're also keeping an eye, as we always do, on the price of oil, which is coming down, at least in the early trade. As you said, sort of wide ranging in terms of talking about Kevin Warsh coming in at the Fed, potentially, hearings of which will take place not very long from now, starting at 10 a.m. Eastern. He did say he would be disappointed, I think, if Warsh didn't lower interest rates, perhaps not a surprise there. Mentioned tariffs and refunds and said that he will remember those companies that choose not to take refunds seemingly in a positive way, perhaps.

Then to your point, and a story that we'll be covering this morning as well, involves Anthropic, that is the news later yesterday about a new investment from Amazon, a new agreement for over 100,000 customers, I'm sorry, for Amazon to invest 5 billion in Anthropic, an additional perhaps up to an additional 20 billion over time, and for Anthropic to take on a lot more capacity in terms of training use at AWS as well to run their models.

Anthropic is in a dispute with the US government. It told the Pentagon, you can't use our models to do two different things. The Pentagon said that's not something we're willing to accept, and by the way, we're going to throw you out and we're going to try and ban you from doing business with any company we do business with. That's in the courts. That part has been enjoined. They did have a meeting last week in the White House. The president did confirm that about the latest model from Anthropic called Mythos, which is incredibly powerful. We talked a lot about Mythos as it relates to the ability to conduct cyber hacks and or defense, but it's a powerful model across the board. And we learned through reporting that it is being, in fact, used by NSA. I reference all of this to give a little context when Andrew asked the president about the relationship with Anthropic. Here's what he had to say.